I had lunch with one of my professors this afternoon. He's been taking groups of 6 students out each week, and this was the week I'd signed up for. Mostly I'm just awed by the professors here, and it's really cool that this professor in particular has made it part of his routine to go to lunch with his students. So it was 6 of us and this Civil Procedure professor -- he's 70 years old, has been at Harvard a long, long time, and in class he's super-sharp, and really quite funny. And we basically were all in awe of him the whole time, he was telling us how of the people he keeps in touch with from his law school class (here, class of '54 I think), one was a U.S. Senator, two were law school deans... he asked us how we like law school so far... I don't know that I said more than three words the entire two hours we were out, but I was content just to listen and absorb. Cool experience.

The funny anecdote I'm getting to is at the end of the lunch -- it was a Chinese lunch buffet -- the guy sitting next to me opens his fortune cookie, and the fortune says: "If you make a promise to give someone something, keep it." Read that again, please. Obviously it means keep the promise, not keep the something -- but what a poor choice of words...

And you're probably thinking, "Now wait a second. He goes to lunch with a professor and the best anecdote he's got is about a fortune cookie." Yeah, that's the best I can do. Actually, here's something else kind of funny -- so we all went up to the buffet once and took some food, and then it became what could perhaps have seemed like a contest of wills to see who'd make the first move to go back and get more food. And nobody did. It's cool, because we were all engaged and listening to the professor, but I thought it was interesting that no one (including me, of course) had the guts (guts isn't the word I'm looking for... I don't know what is though...) to get up and get more food. But still, lunch was really cool.